Manjula's Blog

Super-Speed Internet Satellite Is In Space!!!

2008-02-24T04:29:00Z

1.2 GB per second speed in internet browsing for a low cost??? Is it a dream? or Is it science fiction?

The answer is no. Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has launched an experimental super-speed satellite into orbit yesterday (0855 GMT) as per CNN and BBC. This would be a mile stone in super-speed data communication over the internet. And it would enable Hi-definition TV broadcasts.

This is still in experimental stage and only available in Japan and 19 other loations in south east asia as per JAXA.

This is grea news for the IT industry as a whole.

References

BBC

CNN

Microsoft SkyDrive - Your Online Hard Drive Is Here!!!

2008-02-17T18:07:00Z

Get ready to say good bye to your pen drives, portable hard drives or any other portable mass storage devices. Why? Because Microsoft has launched yet another innovative solution for document management.

Overview

I recently came accross with this fantastic online password protected file storage system by Microsoft and thought of sharing the information with you, the readers of this blog.

Advantages of SkyDrive

This,

Is as mentioned before, an online file storage with password protection
Could access from anywhere in the world where there is a stable internet connection and could modify and share documents without carrying them along wherever we go
Could restrict the file share to the specific people we choose or make them public so the entire world could see them but can't edit them
Could assign access permission to each folder we create
Has 1GB of free online storage
Works with any latest web browser
All file transfers in shared environment is done through SSL (Secured Socket Layer) so the file are secure.

Want to know more?

Visit SkyDrive home page for more information.

References

Microsoft SkyDrive Home

Microsoft Web Deployment Tool Is Here!

2008-02-03T06:59:00Z

Good News for ASP.Net Developers

This is yet another exiting development by Microsoft. I just came across with an article about this tool in the IIS main web site and thought of sharing the information with the readers of this blog.

Overview

Last week Microsoft has launched the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool as a Community Technical Preview (CTP), which provides deployment and migration support for IIS versions 6.0 and 7.0. This tool incorporates many features that enable web server administrators to deploy, sync and migrate websites, including configuration, content, SSL certificates and other types of data associated with a Web server.

This tool can be used on Windows Server 2008 and Internet Information Services 7.0 as well as Windows Server 2003 and Internet Information Services 6.0.

Features

Provides administrators with a way to quickly synchronize a site or server and deploy changes to existing sites and servers
Provides administrators with a way to migrate sites or entire servers from IIS 6.0 to IIS 7.0, including their settings and content
Allows administrators to check what components are installed on the source server. I.e. to check what components to be installed or requirement to have an advanced installation in IIS 7.0
Troubleshooting and Validation Features

Support

For support in this tool please refer to the support forum, or download the documentation here.

Requirements

The following prerequisites must be fulfilled in order to install the tool:

You must be using Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008.
The .NET 2.0 Framework SP1 or greater must be installed.
Internet Information Services 6.0 or 7.0 must be installed in order to perform operations on IIS.
You must install the tool as an administrator. If User Access Control (UAC) is enabled, you must use the “Run as Administrator” option when installing.

Download

You can download the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool here.

References

IIS

ScottGu's Blog

Choose the right connection string for your data source!

2008-01-20T06:23:00Z

Hi friends! I thought of sharing this URL with you all where I usually get information about connection strings. This has been a reference site for me on various connection strings for several years now. It's a great site where it gives a collection of connection strings for most of the databases servers, data files and other data sources in one place. And it gives connection strings for different scenarios (ODBC, OLE DB etc) for the same data source as well.

Check it out.

http://www.connectionstrings.com/

Volta - Get Electrocuted with Visual Studio 2008!

2008-01-07T04:50:00Z

Microsoft dudes, slow down! We can't keep up!!! But I'm glad you're trying to reduce the "New Stuff" we have to learn by putting forward this project

Overview

Hot news! This is not about Alessandro Volta. This is something Microsoft has released code named Volta. On December 05th 2007 Microsoft Live Labs has announced about VOLTA. Yet again another new term for our geek vocabulary (but they might change it in future)! Volta, as the name hints it's nothing to do with electricity But I think they are trying to equate it's super fast development cycle to an electric current or trying to bridge the gap between distributed bits and pieces of a distributed web application using a spark/ tool.

Volta is a new set of tools developed by Microsoft to develop distributed multi-tier web applications super fast or may I say, with a minimum learning curve using the existing set of .Net tools. I just came across with this information while surfing the internet and reading through blog entries by the peers in the .Net community. Then I started digging into more information. I would like to share what I've learnt with the users of the user group and the readers of this blog. I'll start with an introduction as usual.

What is Volta?

Developed by Erik Meijer (who has also worked in the LINQ project) and a team of developers @ Microsoft
Used to democratize the internet cloud. What??? Watch and learn!
As I said in the overview Volta is a new set of web development tools developed by Microsoft to develop distributed multi-tier web applications with a minimum learning curve using the existing set of .Net tools, techniques and design patterns without incorporating mixture of technologies, languages and tools.
Tier (execution context) splitting (another new geek term!) system where the details of the tiers aren't of primary importance
Much more than a web technology
This is yet a Community Technical Preview (CTP), it'll take time to get adopted to the .Net web development community. But Volta is going to be a revolution in .Net world and the way we build web applications using .Net compatible languages like C# and VB.Net in future. Therefore it's a must we keep track of the developments around Volta and have some hands on experience. We can download the Volta toolset by clicking on the link shown below
Extension to Visual Studio 2008 and .Net framework 3.5 (and most probably for all above versions to come)
We can postpone the multi tier architecture of the distributed web application till the last critical moment of the development process. I.e. first, we can design and build our application as a .NET client application (single-tier application), then assign the portions of the application to run on the server and the client tiers late in the development process (Tier Splitting). I.e. letting the complier manage creating boilerplate code such as communication between tiers
The compiler will create cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code (redundancy of code) to tie the tiers together
We can still debug and test the application, as if it were still on the client-tier, because Volta's tier-splitting is deeply integrated with Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5
We can target either web browsers (be it IE or Firefox) or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting. We don't need to worry about that
Comprises with tools such as end-to-end profiling to make architectural refactoring and optimization simple and quick
We may base tier assignments on any criteria, such as load management, performance, or location of critical assets and capabilities. Because Volta automates the hidden linking code, it is easy for us to experiment with varying assignments of classes and methods to tiers
We can use all the .NET languages, libraries, and tools we already know, including debuggers, profilers, test generators, refactoring, and code analysis tools to develop distributed web applications. Volta will handle the rest

Learn more

There are lot of study material and sample code to start with at Volta home page. Go and grab them.

Summery

Volta extends the .NET platform to distributed software and services applications, by using existing and familiar libraries, languages, tools, and techniques without the need to learn new technologies, languages and usage of tools to bridge the communication gap between distributed code/ Objects.

Download Volta now and get electrocuted!

Coming Up!

An article about Tesla my hero! Get ready to be electrocuted again

References

Volta home page

View introductory video by the creators of Volta - Part 1 - Erik Meijer and team @ Channel 9, MSDN

View introductory video by the creators of Volta - Part 2 - Erik Meijer and team @ Channel 9, MSDN

Erik Meijer's home page @ Microsoft

Erik Meijer's article about Volta - pdf document

About Erik Meijer - by QCon

About Erik Meijer - by Alex Barnett

Erik Meijer talks about LINQ

‘Volta’: Microsoft’s dev platform in the Cloud? - by Mary Jo

Beware with debug="true" in Web.config file of an ASP.Net web application

2008-01-06T08:26:00Z

Problem

I thought of sharing this information with the users of the user group and the readers of this blog. I just came across with an odd situation in my enhancement project developed in ASP.Net 1.0. (As usual)

The problem was that I compiled the project in the "Debug" mode and it went through rigorous testing and life was good. But, later on I noticed that I compiled with "Debug" mode and changed back to "Release" mode and re-compiled the application. This is because if we use debug="true" in our production (live) application it will perform less efficiently than when we use debug="false". See below comments of a sample Web.config file.

</httpModules>

If you need further clarifications on why there's a performance issue please refer to the following article by experts in the industry because this article is about a different scenario related to these settings.

Beware of deploying debug code in production - by Milan Negovan

Don’t run production ASP.NET Applications with debug=”true” enabled - by Scott Guthrie @ Microsoft

Ok back to the problem. Then after this change one of the pages that retreive data from two databases start giving "Request Timed Out" error. This page normally takes more than two minutes to retrieve data. Again if I set debug="true" and re-compile this page wouldn't give any errors. It's wired. So I sort help from good old friend Google.

Solution

When I searched Google I found many people has faced the same issue way before than me (see references). According to the replies in these forums I realised that we just need to add the following tag within <system.web> </system.web> tags. E.g

<system.web>

............

</system.web>

References

DevX Discussions

Velocity Reviews

Microsoft Launch Central

2008-01-06T05:53:00Z

Microsoft Launch Central

I just heard about this website where we can keep up with the latest product releases by Microsoft.

Take a look at it

SubSonic - Part 1 - An Introduction

2008-01-03T06:27:00Z

Overview

This is another interesting article about the new trends of the software industry. I would like to share the information I gathered while researching on this new toolset with the user group members and the readers of this blog. I thought of writing about SubSonic because it's another way of accessing/ Querying the database (Actually, SubSonic is a third party toolset to auto generate the Data Access Layer (DAL) of our application and maintain it when the database changes). This is just another handy tool for us as LINQ. Therefore I'll write about SubSonic in parallel to the LINQ articles. We can compare LINQ and SubSonic later on. Since this is the first article about SubSonic in this forum I'll start with an introduction.

What is SubSonic?

SubSonic, initially named as ActionPack is developed as an open source project by Rob Conery before he joined Microsoft, but who is currently working for Microsoft in the ASP.Net team under Scott Guthrie. The other team members of this project are Eric Kemp, Scott Watermasysk, Jon Galloway, Phil Haack, and Gavin Joyce. This project has got attention from Microsoft even though it is still an open source project. SubSonic will be developed on top of ASP.Net and the new MVC framework that Microsoft has given more attention of. (This information is true at the time of writing this article and as per the SubSonic Project & Rob Conery's comments)
We can download the latest source code here
SubSonic is a toolset that helps a website build itself. It brings some of the fun and elegance of Ruby on Rails to ASP.NET
This implements Active Record design pattern.
Helps us quickly build data driven websites without writing data manipulation code
Has a DAL generator that enables us to rapidly create strongly typed collections and CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) enabled objects, which represent the selected database tables
Has an object relational (OR) mapper which extends to stored procedures and views
Could also automatically generate the UI for the data manipulation tasks (scaffolding support). This is very handy when creating the admin panel of a data driven web applications. We don't need to worry about creating it from scratch
Has a dynamic query tool that let us use SQL Server, MySQL and Enterprise Library (Application Blocks) without having to know the underlying SQL syntax (Lets go into technical details in the next articles to follow)
We just need to give the reference to the SubSonic DLL and set SubSonic settings in the Web.config file to make use of the power of SubSonic (Lets go into technical details in the next articles to follow)
Saves lot of development time and that is the main objective of creating SubSonic. Will our bosses give more work for the time we save using SubSonic?

Summery

SubSonic is an open source tool set to auto generate data manipulation code and interfaces. This works on top of ASP.Net and the MVC framework. This gives an extension and a cool new addition to the strength of .Net compliance languages and most importantly this SAVES lot of development time.

Rule Of Thumb

I'm pretty sure SubSonic will not replace classic SQL, T/SQL or PL/SQL but it will extend the data manipulation capability of the programmer. IT saves lot of time. It's a pretty cool tool to be in our tool box. We as the programmers must decide when to use it and when not to.

References

LINQ - Part 2 - FAQs & Answers

2008-01-02T05:42:00Z

Overview

I thought of listing down few Frequently Asked Questions about LINQ and their answers before proceeding to the technical details of it. This is mainly because I might have missed any introductory information regarding LINQ. Please refer to the below LINQ FAQ related web postings.

More Links to LINQ

Links to LINQ

Visual Studio 2003/2005 keyboard shortcuts

2007-12-31T12:11:00Z

Tip

I just found these interesting articles and thought of sharing with the readers of this blog and the user group members. You could find most of the keyboard shortcuts of Visual Studio here. And you could download a poster of your preffered language here.

Enjoy!

References

Coding Horror - by Jeff Atwood

Rob Caron's Blog

LINQ - Part 1 - the new querying enhancement to C# and VB.Net

2007-12-30T13:23:00Z

Overview

I thought of gathering some information about Microsoft's latest querying technology and summerising that information here so that readers of this Blog and the members of the .NetFoundry user group will benefit from it. There's lot to talk about LINQ. Therefore I'll split this article into several parts and publish separately. Since this is the first article about LINQ in the user group I'll start with an introductory and would try to give a glimps in to LINQ.

What is LINQ?

LINQ - Language INtegrated Query
Is an extension to .Net compliant languages like C#, VB.Net and others for general purpose querying
Object based, language integrated way to query over data no matter from where that data came from or generated
Is a universal querying mechanism where we can query objects, collections, text files, relational data and XML
Could retrieve data from any object that implements the IEnumerable<T> interface
Is an integral part of Visual Studio 2008 and could incorporate with Visual Studio 2005 as an additional CTP download
Used to overcome the impedance mismatch between programming languages and database
LINQ has been separated into three main areas. They are,

LINQ to Object
LINQ to ADO.Net (LINQ enabled ADO.Net)

LINQ to SQL - DLINQ
LINQ to DataSet
LINQ to Entities

LINQ to XML - XLINQ

Highly extensible

LINQ Architecture

The architecture of LINQ is depicted below and it is self explanatory.

Advantages of using LINQ

There's a common syntax for querying any data source mentioned above. This eliminates the one source - one query language concept. I.e. for example Relational Data -> SQL, XML Documents -> XPath and .Net objects -> .Net built in operators such as foreach.
Able to use LINQ with .Net 1.x and .Net 2.0 objects
Able to extend LINQ to support new classes and technologies
Integrated to the .Net framework thereby accessible from any .Net compliant language (native code) and make use of their stregths and compile time syntax checking. E.g. it inherits the new C# language features like,

Implicitly typed variables e.g. var keyword
Extension methods
Lambda expressions
Anonymous types
Expression Trees

Avoids dynamic creation of string queries within native code (e.g. C#) and thereby avoiding the disadvantage of not having compile time checking of queries. I.e. eliminating mixture of native code and none native code. This also saves time on creating a dynamic query.
Intelli sense is available in Visual Studio
Designer support
Gives more power to the front-end programmer to manipulate data
Shorter learning curve
Could access stored procedures and user defined functions in a relational database

Disadvantages

Mainly focus on or support SQL Server but not Oracle or other databases such as MySQL, DB2. Others have to provide their own provider model or extension.
Lack of "Left/ Right" keywords in a Join even though the objectives are met
Data manipulation logic/code is written in the application rather than the DB end in LINQ to SQL.

This would be a problem when we want to change the logic without changing or re-compiling the application code
Problem of viewing the execution plan and optimising the query

Database programmers would be jobless (Joke!)

Summery

LINQ is a common method of accessing objects that implements IEnumerable <T> interface, relational data, text files and XML. This gives an extension and a cool new addition to the strength of .Net compliance languages even though there are several disadvantages of it.

Rule Of Thumb

I'm pretty sure LINQ will not replace classic SQL, T/SQL or PL/SQL but it will extend the data manipulation capability of the programmer. Its a pretty cool tool to be in our tool box. We as the programmers must decide when to use it and when not to.

References

MSDN - 101 LINQ Samples

The LINQ project

ScottGu's Blog

The evolution of LINQ and its impact on the design of C#

Rediscovering IEnumerable<T> - by Tomas Restrepo

What is LINQ? by Saquib Ullah

Dedicated website for LINQ

Is LINQ the future of database development? - by Arthur Fuller

Beware with Math.Round() in C#

2007-12-26T07:44:00Z

Problem

Recently I found an issue with the Math.Round() function in C# while working on an enhancement project written in Visual Studio 2003. I.e. this function is using the Banker's method. The users of this system didn't like the way figures are getting rounded and they wanted the method used in Excel (Because they are used to Excel ). I.e. Symmetric Arithmetic Rounding method. E.g

Say we want to round 1234.50000 into the nearest integer value. Then Math.Round() returns 1234 whereas MS Excel gives 1235.

I also found a similar issue in SQL Server 2000 some time back. It seems that Microsoft uses contradictory methods of rounding in their products (Visual Studio, SQL Server, Visual Basic, Excel etc.)

Most of us learnt this banker's method while schooling. But it seems that there are many other ways of rounding. Click here to view all methods of rounding and how you can implement custom rounding procedures.

Solution

Visual Studio 2003 - If we want to use Symmetric Arithmetic Rounding method we have to write our own function instead of using Math.Round(). See below for a working function found in CoderSource.Net.

public static double roundNum(double num, int place)
{

double n;
n = num * Math.Pow(10, place);
n = Math.Sign(n) * Math.Abs(Math.Floor(n + .5));
return n / Math.Pow(10, place);

}

Visual Studio 2005 - This problem is sorted in this version of Visual Studio. We can now select the rounding method in;

System.Math.Round

Rule Of Thumb

Always ask from the users which method of rounding they want during the system requirements gathering stage. This will avoid us being using the default method of rounding in our chosen development language. In this case C#.

References

Wikipedia

Microsoft Help and Support

CoderSource.Net

My First WebBlog Entry!

2007-12-26T07:27:00Z

Hello .net world!

Finally I've decided to blog. Danish Sami was kind enough to help set me up with this new blog. Thanks Danish